Hepcats and muffled drum beats: Kerouac takes a trip

Yeah man, I'm a lonesome traveller - ain't we all? Anyway, few do it better (travelling around and writing about it) than Jack Kerouac and I've just ploughed through his excellent 1960 collection of travel essays to ferret out a few musical snippets. In fact, these are all from the 'Big Trip To Europe' chapter, which seems to be particularly well attuned to music. As well as featuring quite a few tearful outbursts ...

Who you calling a beat, you bum? Kerouac out on the street

It's called Big Trip To Europe but the chapter kicks off (after a slightly hairy-sounding Atlantic sea crossing) with Kerouac's time in Morocco (Tangier). And he wasn't always alone either but spent time hanging out with William Burroughs and others. For example, he recounts how one day, after spending the night with a local sex worker (yep, Kerouac was apparently quite partial to "whores"), he meets up the next morning with some of his "connections from England and Morocco and USA" who, he says, "were all blasting home-made pipes of opium and singing Cab Calloway's old tune, I'm Gonna Kick The Gong Around. Hmm, groovy (sort of). For Kerouac, Tangier seems to have been both lacking in excitement ("unutterably dull, no vibrations") and full of satisfying moments, quite a few of them drug-fuelled. One day, he says, he and Burroughs "got some opium from a guy in a red fez" and smoked it while "singing Willie the Moocher" (geddit?). As ever, Kerouac always seems to have a sharp eye for style, mentioning, for example, seeing "two little Arab hepcats" (boys of around ten) in Tangier, and how one had "a yellow skullcap and blue zoot suit". It might not always have thrummed with excitement for Kerouac but Tangier also has a Saturday night "parade", with "bagpipes, drums and trumpets", while on another night he remembers how "a lovely flute began to blow around three o'clock in the morning, and muffled beats beat somewhere in the depths of the Medina". Beat poet hears muffled beats beating ...

After Morocco Kerouac goes to France, travelling northwards from Marseille to Dieppe via a much-anticipated stay in Paris ("Paris, a stab in the heart finally"). In Paris, "paddywagons flew by singing dee da, dee da", and he spots a Parisian "hepcat in dark glasses, faintly mustached" waiting by the statue of Danton on Boulevard Saint-Germain. En route to his beloved Paris (everything about France is a sort of virtual homecoming for the French-American Kerouac) Kerouac also stops in to the Cathédrale Saint-Sauveur in Provence and is blown away by it all:

"After the vermouths I went to the Cathedral of St Sauveur, which was just a shortcut to the highway, and there on passing an old man with white hair and beret (and all around on the horizon Cezanne's springtime 'green' which I had forgotten went with his smoky-blue hills and rust-red roof) I cried - I cried in Cathedral of the Savior to hear the choir boys sing a gorgeous old thing, while angels seemed to be hovering around - I couldn't help myself."

Yes, sentimental old fool Jack Kerouac also cries when he gets to London after France, crying "most of the time" as he sits through a Good Friday performance by the St Paul's Choir of Bach's St Matthew Passion. Not only did he cry in St Paul's, but he also "saw a vision of an angel in my mother's kitchen" there. Big Trip To Europe (like the rest of Lonesome Traveller) seems to me to be classic Kerouac. Super-emotional yet often laced with quite sharp observations, it's all suffused with a strange blend of druggy-alcoholic mysticism, as well as out-and-out Catholicism and intense loner yearning. As I found when piling through his amazing Visions Of Cody recently, there's a lot going on in Kerouac's writing, even at its most unrestrained, and there's nearly always a certain musicality to it. Either in the writing itself or literally in the stuff he's describing. Basically, hepcats and muffled drum beats are everywhere on Planet Kerouac.